Ted, an easy rich text processor
Ted is a text processor running under X Windows
on Unix/Linux systems. Ted was developed as a standard easy word
processor, having the role of Wordpad on MS-Windows. Since then,
Ted has evolved to a real word processor that still has the same easy
appearance as the original. The possibility to type a letter, a note or a
report on a Unix/Linux machine is clearly missing. Only too often, you have
to turn to MS-Windows machine to write a letter or a document. Ted
was made to make it possible to edit rich text documents on Unix/Linux in a
wysiwyg way. RTF files from Ted are fully compatible with MS-Word.
Additionally, Ted also is an RTF to PostScript and an RTF to Acrobat
PDF converter.
Compatibility with
popular MS-Windows applications played an important role in the design of
Ted. Every document produced by Ted fully compatible with
MS-Word without any loss of formatting or information. Compatibility in the
other direction is more difficult to achieve. Ted supports many of
the formatting features of the Microsoft applications. Other formatting
instructions and meta information are ignored.1 By ignoring unsupported formatting Ted
tries to get the complete text of a document on screen or to the printer.
Ted can be used to read formatted e-mail sent from a Windows machine to
Unix, to print an RTF document, or to convert it to Acrobat PDF format.
Below we explain how to configure Ted as an RTF viewer in Netscape
and how to convert an RTF document to PDF with Ted and GhostScript.
I hope that you will find Ted
useful. Please report the bugs you find, such that I can fix them.
| · | Wysiwyg rich text editing. You can use all fonts for which you have an .afm file and that are available as an X11 font. Ted is delivered with .afm files for the Adobe fonts that are available on Motif systems and in all postscript printers: Times, Helvetica, Courier and Symbol. Other fonts can be added with the normal X11 procedure. Font properties like bold and italic are supported; so is underlining and are subscripts and superscripts. |
| · | Ted uses Microsoft RTF as its native file format. Microsoft Word and Wordpad can read files produced by Ted. Usually Ted can read .rtf files from Microsoft Word and Wordpad. As Ted does not support all features of Word,some formatting information might be lost. |
| · | In line bitmap and windows metafile pictures. |
| · | PostScript printing of the document and its illustrations. Saved PostScript files contain pdfmarks that are converted to hyperlinks when they are converted to Acrobat PDF. |
| · | Spelling checking in twelve Latin languages. |
| · | Directly mailing documents from Ted. Mail in HTML format is a multipart message that contains all images hyperlinks and footnotes. |
| · | Cut/Copy/Paste, also with other applications. |
| · | Find/Replace. |
| · | Ruler: Paragraph indentation, Indentation of first line, Tabs. Copy/Paste Ruler. |
| · | Page breaks. |
| · | Page headers and footers. Page numbers in page headers and page footers. |
| · | Tables: Insert Table, Row, Column. Changing the column width of tables with their ruler. |
| · | Symbols and accented characters are fully supported. |
| · | Hyperlinks and bookmarks. |
| · | Footnotes and endnotes. |
| · | Saving a document in HTML format. |
| · | Probably the best illustration of what you can do with Ted is its documentation that has been made with Ted. |
This is the
documentation for Ted 2.11. For a detailed description and a manual
refer to the readme files in RTF, HTML, PDF or plain text format. For version information refer to the announcement of this version.
Ted is free software. By making Ted
freely available, I want to contribute to the propagation of Linux as a
viable platform for technical computer enthusiasts. As Ted is free
software, I assume no responsibility for the consequences of using it. It
is up to you to decide whether Ted suits your purpose or not. Ted
is distributed with absolutely no warranty under the terms of the GNU Public License.
Ted is an X11 program. To start it just invoke Ted &
or /usr/local/bin/Ted &. To start Ted with a certain file
invoke Ted something.rtf &. Several special purpose calls of Ted
are documented in the manual.
The installation
of Ted depends on the platform and on the kind of distribution.
Binary distributions for Intel ix86 Linux are available from the download
site ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/editors/ted. The distribution comes in the form of
compressed tar archives and as Red Hat package manager (RPM) packages.
Binary distributions for other platforms might be available on CD. For more
or more recent information refer to the Ted web site
http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted.
To install Ted
or one of the localization packages from an RPM package, log in as root,
and give the command rpm -i
<package-details>.rpm . To
upgrade from a previous version of Ted give the command rpm -U <package-details>.rpm. The executable in the binary package is
linked statically, so there are no dependencies on shared libraries. If you
like shared libraries and their intricacies, you will have to compile Ted
yourself.
Installation from
compressed tar archives is best done in combination with the corresponding
Linux Software Map (LSM) files and the installation script installTed.sh. Download the files to a scratch directory such as /tmp; log
in as root; run sh installTed.sh from this directory. If you do not have the
possibility to log in as root, you can run the command sh installTed.sh PRIVATE.After a private install the install script
tells you what to include in your .Xdefaults or .Xresources file to make
the installation work.
If you do not like
easy installation, you can unpack the compressed tar archives manually. The
software assumes that you do so in /usr/local. The Adobe font metric files
are stored in /usr/local/afm and spell checking dictionaries in
/usr/local/ind. This online document is installed as
/usr/local/Ted/TedDocument-en_US.rtf. The example application resource file
Ted.ad.sample is installed in /usr/local/Ted. If you decide to install
Ted in a different location, you can change these locations by setting
X11 resources, e.g. in your .Xdefaults or .Xresources file. Refer to the
section on configuration below. Do not forget to call umask 0
before you unpack.
It is also
possible to compile Ted from source. Refer to the compilation
instructions at the end of this document.
Overview of the different packages:
|
Package
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RPM package: file
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Tar archive, LSM file
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Basic binary package for Intel
Linux. (Includes American spelling)
|
ted:
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Install script for Tar archives
and LSM files
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Dutch spelling and messages
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ted_nl_NL:
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British spelling
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ted_en_GB:
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German spelling and messages.
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ted_de_DE:
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Spanish spelling
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ted_es_ES:
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Portuguese spelling
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ted_pt_PT:
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French spelling and messages.
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ted_fr_FR:
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Italian spelling
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ted_it_IT:
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Czech spelling and messages
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ted_cs_CZ:
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Danish spelling and messages
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ted_da_DK:
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Swedish spelling
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ted_sv_SE:
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Norwegian spelling
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ted_no_NO:
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Polish spelling
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ted_pl_PL:
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Slovak spelling and messages
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ted_sk_SK:
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Hungarian messages
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ted_hu_HU:
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Source2
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ted:
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Spelling dictionary examples.
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rtf to pdf script
rtf to PostScript script
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The spelling packages have been renamed since Ted 2.6 to comply with naming conventions. If rpm complains about conflicts, please remove the conflicting old package using the command rpm -e old_package.
For languages that
use the Latin 2 character set, Latin 2 fonts are best. The ult1mo package
is a useful collection of Latin 2 fonts. The current version does not give
an ItalicAngle for the bold italic fonts. For the correct operation of Ted,
a negative italic angle should be inserted manually.
A collection of
Ted packages for the NetBSD operating system is available via
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc/editors/ted/README.html.
A french
translation of Ted by Jean Peyratout can be found on the page http://www.abul.org/education/ted.php3.
To compile and
link Ted, get the source code from the download site ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/editors/ted. Unpack the archive and follow the
instructions below. When you use other Unix versions than Linux, realize
that the construction of a distribution package uses the gzip compression
utility and the chown root:root syntax. Although statically linked
executables of Ted run on any X Windows system, to compile and link,
you need a motif development environment. If you do not have one you can
use LessTif, a free motif implementation. Ted has been tested with
LessTif, and though there are a few peculiarities, the combination of
Ted and LessTif works quite well. LessTif is available from
http://www.lesstif.org.
Alternatively you can use the Open Motif distribution by the open group
refer to http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif.
Ted 2.11 can be compiled with the GTK+ 1.2.8
toolkit or a later version. The GTK version is not complete and should be
seen as step in the right direction. Not as a finished piece of software.
Jouk Jansen made fixes to the Ted source to compile on Compaq
OpenVMS. Additional files, including an explanatory notice by Jouk can be
found in the vms_files.tar archive that is part of the source.
Apart from a motif development
environment, you might need one or more of the public graphics libraries
that Ted uses.
| · | Libtiff by Sam Leffler. If you do not have it, download it. |
| · | Libjpeg by the independent JPEG group. If you do not have it, download it. Version 6 is required. If the link stage complains about undefined symbols like jpeg_std_error, you are using version 5. |
| · | Libpng by the PNG group. If you do not have it, download it. You will also need zlib by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler. If you do not have it, download it. |
| · | LibXpm by Arnaud Le Hors of Groupe Bull. If you do not have it, download it. |
I want to express
my gratitude to the authors of all the free software libraries I have used
for Ted. Without them, a project like Ted would have been
impossible.
Unpacking the
source archive results in a Ted-<version> directory. The compilation
procedure has some support for graphics libraries that are not preinstalled
on the system. It assumes that they are installed in the Ted-<version>
directory, that a link from a generic name to a version dependent one
exists, and that the library has been successfully compiled. Compiling the
executable is simply done with the command make in the Ted-<version>
directory. There is no need to call
configure as this is done by
make. You can change some compilation options by editing the top level
makefile. Refer to the comments in the top of the file. When make is
successful, there is a Ted executable in the Ted directory.
To make an installation package, call
make package. This must be done
as root. The installation package tedPackage/Ted_<platform>.tar.gz
is now ready. To install it on your machine, call make install.
Installation must be done as root. Those that cannot perform the
last steps as root can call make private to get a private installation. The make private call will suggest the necessary modifications to your .Xdefaults or
.Xresources file to run from a private installation. The ultimate
possibility is to copy the Ted executable to a suitable location and
to unpack the relevant files from the tedPackage/TedBindist.tar archive.
Refer to the sections on installation and configuration for details.
On some platforms,
in particular Sun Solaris, no static Motif and X libraries are available.
For those platforms, and for shared library zealots, the alternative make
targets compile.shared, package.shared and install.shared are available.
Mark de Does
March 1, 2002
More or more recent information on
Ted might be available from the Ted web site
http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted. The
latest versions and the source code from ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/editors/ted.
| P.S. | Please do not use my mail address when you refer to me or to Ted. I already receive enough unsollicited email. You can either refer to the web page or use an image. |
| 1 | Some of the ignored information is not saved either when you modify and then save an RTF document with Ted. |
| 2 | Please read the compilation instructions at the end of this document before you start compiling Ted. They are short and easy. |